Berkeley Lab Search

Jennet Dickinson, a graduate student researcher at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley, explains her role in a new particle physics result, announced today, that relates to the Higgs boson and it’s interaction with another particle, the top quark.

A team led by Berkeley Lab researchers has enlisted powerful supercomputers to calculate a quantity, known as the “nucleon axial coupling” or gA, that is central to our understanding of a neutron’s lifetime.

VIDEO: A recap of the Berkeley Lab Physics Photowalk. (Credit: Marilyn Chung/Berkeley Lab) Dozens of photographers visited the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) on Wednesday, May 16 – coinciding with the International Day of Light – to creatively capture scenes of science at Lab facilities including the Advanced Light Source,

The world’s cutting-edge particle accelerators are pushing the extremes in high-brightness beams and ultrashort pulses to explore matter in new ways. To optimize their performance – and to prepare for next-generation facilities that will push these extremes further – scientists have devised a new tool that can measure how bright these beams are, even for pulses that last only quadrillionths or even quintillionths of a second.

Just five years after joining Berkeley Lab as a Physics Division fellow, Zach Marshall is co-leading an international team of researchers in search of supersymmetry — the theory that every known particle has a “superpartner” particle. Now with funding from an early career award announced last November, Marshall and his team are building a powerful super-scheduling platform that will help particle physicists process more data faster without investing in costly new computing infrastructure.

Scientists working on the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR experiment have shown that they can shield a sensitive, scalable germanium detector array from background radioactivity – a critical step to developing a large experiment to study the nature of neutrinos and probe the universe’s matter-antimatter imbalance.

A new particle detector design proposed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Berkeley Lab could greatly broaden the search for dark matter – which makes up 85 percent of the total mass of the universe yet we don’t know what it’s made of – into an unexplored realm.

After completing her Ph.D. thesis in calculating the mass of the W boson – a heavier-than-iron elementary particle that mediates one of the universe’s fundamental forces – physics researcher Aleksandra Dimitrievska is now testing components at Berkeley Lab for a scheduled upgrade of the world’s largest particle detectors.

In an analysis of data from an experiment embedded in Antarctic ice, a research collaboration including scientists from Berkeley Lab has demonstrated that the Earth stops high-energy neutrinos – particles that only very rarely interact with matter.

In a previous career with the U.S. Air Force, Sandra Miarecki flew high above the Earth’s surface. She retired from the Air Force in 2007 to pursue a new calling in physics that would set her sights on particles traveling into the depths of the Earth.